I would like to be able to access certain personal information without booting up into the Xserver. Can anyone recommend tty apps that would let me get access to my calendar, email, contacts, etc without waiting for a full boot-up?

You don't mention what applications you used for your contacts, calendar and email, however, I suspect they are all some form of GUI application. If that is the case it will not be easy to access the data. It may be stored as a database file of some sort or an XML flat file. If you provide the necessary details like what applications you were in fact using then maybe we can help you a bit....

Good point. My calendar is Google Calendar (I access it in various ways: Evolution, Google Gears, etc) and my email in GMail. In reality, I just want to be able to access my email and calendar without starting an X server. I know that Mutt can store GMail Inboxes, but I don't know how to set that up, and I have never heard of an ncurses app for Google Calendar.